HPE, EMC and Pure Storage are all in competition to form partnerships with the best solution providers in the field. Channel chiefs talk about what their respective companies are doing to help partners evolve.

In an interview with CRN, Dell's Cheryl Cook detailed some of the growth numbers Dell's channel has experienced this year, and laid out a broad strategy for how the company will bring its programs together with EMC's.

In Part Two of a series, channel chiefs at five of the top storage vendors admit that the world does not revolve around them, and said solution providers looking to offer complete solutions need to explore a variety of partnerships and technologies.

SolidFire founder Dave Wright said the technology, marketing and channel integration of the company with its new parent, NetApp, is moving quickly, giving NetApp a unique opportunity to take its storage business to an ever-wider range of customers.

Cisco, which tried and failed in its earlier attempt to bring all-flash storage to its Cisco UCS server platform by acquiring Whiptail, has invested in an Israel-based startup focusing on software-defined, all-flash storage solutions.

The English translation of the original Japanese-language report with a headline that says Hitachi is 'freezing' its high-end storage business is great fodder for competitors, but does not reflect the real changes going on throughout the entire storage industry, HDS execs said.

Formation Data Systems added the capability to its FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform software-defined storage application as a way to help customers with multiple commodity servers recover capacity lost to virtual machine sprawl.

The HPE 3Par StoreServ solution is getting a makeover this week with the addition of new high-capacity SSDs and new software to make it easier to protect and move data stored in all-flash environments.

Lenovo, which already works with Nutanix on hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, has added Cloudian to its stable of software-focused storage partners, this time with an emphasis on the object storage market.

The new licensing scheme offers license portability so that capacity can be deployed and re-deployed quickly without additional cost except for the hardware, which SolidFire says will be sold at its cost.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.